Is Twitter Still a Social Media Platform?
Having been reluctant in the past about jumping into social media for business purposes I did a lot of study before setting up my Twitter page. When I finally set up a page I immediately found it to be a valuable source of information that assisted me daily by providing great articles that helped my education. As my following and followers increased I was amazed at the information put in front of me on a regular basis but felt that something was missing. I found that it wasn’t being social!
To test whether or not there was real engagement I began to post links to interesting articles and adding a question. On one occasion I posted a question about the subject of link farms and added the question “What are your thoughts about Link Farms?” I truly felt that this would stimulate some discussion on the subject as my followers are predominantly in the SEO/Social Media field. I was somewhat dismayed to find that rather than respond to my question I simply saw tons of posts to my page that were nothing more than a headline statement with a link. Within a matter of two minutes I had another 58 tweets show up without a single response to my question. I then followed a link on one post to a great article on “growth hacking” and posted a reply to it. Within a minute I saw another reply show up to my reply but then nothing. During the time it took to receive that one reply I also had another 29 tweets show up. I have repeated this test several times over a number of days and have observed the same response, or lack of response. What happened to being social?
Is it that the people on Twitter are so busy blasted out their own stuff that they don’t bother to read and reply to others? Are we simply seeing a lot of automated posting where there is nobody behind the keyboard actually reading what is posted and engaging with it? If this is supposed to be a social platform then we need to begin to engage with those we follow and follow us. Twitter is not supposed to be a bulletin board where we simply post and forget. Let’s get back to making it social and engage more and post less!